Carolyn Goodman memoir recalls a life of idealism in the face of tragedy

Pacific Grove >> Fifty years ago this summer, three young men were killed in a thickly wooded crossroads south of Philadelphia, Miss. They certainly weren't the first to die at the hands of vigilante mobs in Mississippi. But the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — an African American and two Jews — by the Ku Klux Klan sparked an outrage that turned the tide against Jim Crow racial violence in the South.

It was more than 30 years later when Pacific Grove writer Brad Herzog met the person perhaps most transformed by the murders: the mother of Andrew Goodman. Herzog's relationship with Carolyn Goodman continued until her death in 2007 at 91.

And now, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer, Herzog is releasing "My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice," Carolyn Goodman's own story. Herzog, who co-wrote the memoir, will be at the Pacific Grove Public Library on Thursday to discuss the book.

Her son's death at the age of 20 was only one is a series of personal tragedies that characterized Carolyn Goodman's life. She was sexually molested as a child. Her father committed suicide. Her husband died unexpectedly. But she became a tireless activist and advocate for the causes of justice and nonviolence for the rest of her life.

Through a series of interviews, Herzog helped Goodman document her own story. "One of the great things about collaborating with Carolyn," said Herzog, "was that her stories were so lyrical, so profound. She really knew how to tell a story. She just had a natural gift for it."

In 1964, the Goodman family lived on New York's Upper West Side, about as far away in the U.S., culturally and socioeconomically, as you could be from rural Mississippi. In the book, she tells the story of her idealistic son Andy and his desire to participate in the Mississippi Summer Project with other northern college students to teach and mobilize disenfranchised blacks. His mother knew all too well the history of social justice in the Deep South to that point, as well as the names of the martyred — Emmett Till, Mack Charles Parker, Medgar Evers.

"The Deep South put fear in my heart in 1964," she said in "My Mantelpiece." "Mississippi was a terrifying word."

As a mother, she was dead set against allowing her son to go to such a place. But she had spent a lifetime agitating for women's suffrage, organizing farmers during the Depression, fighting against fascism in Spain and against McCarthyism at home. She and her husband, Bobby, had raised all her children with those values. She referred to Andy as "the symphony of our dreams." She realized she could not forbid him to go.

"She realized if she said no, their values would always ring hollow," said Herzog.

The book goes on to recount Goodman's own childhood and her life as an activist after Andy's death. When she died, her other son David — who inherited the directorship of the Andrew Goodman Foundation from his mother — persuaded Herzog to publish Carolyn's memoir.

"She was a tough, no-nonsense woman," he said. "She was not a sayer but a doer."

He said that, in the 1990s, David Goodman received a call informing him that his mother had been arrested protesting the case of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant killed by New York police. "And David sighed and said, 'Yes, that happens from time to time.'"

Carolyn Goodman's "My Mantelpiece," published by Why Not Books with a forward by Maya Angelou, will be available May 1 as a hardcover and e-book. For more information on the book, go to www.whynotbooks.com. For more information on the Andrew Goodman Foundation, go to www.andrewgoodman.org.